THE MARKET AND THE GOVERNMENT April 17, 2007

Jason Soon, at Catallaxy sets up the discussion by contrasting a quote from Hilary Clinton and Virginia Postel.

I suspect based on my experience that the State does a superior job for greatest majority of people in providing such services as health care and education. I think it is plain nonsense to suppose that people are economically empowered by a market system that provides employment conditions, often strangely entrenched by government regulation, that systematically diminishes their potential as human beings and their capacity as citizens. The mixed economy, combined with reasonably regular changes of political orientation, offered a means of checks and balances, a clockwork economy, not of stasis but progressive economic advancement.

Other than direct experience I have nothing to say. Perhaps these discussions are like the expositions of the philosophers on the floating island in Gulliver’s Tales (I saw the movie).

Still this is a fundamental political debate, presented often in black and white, but in political reality a series of spectrum shifts, that become quantum jumps, whereby in one realization the State becomes the instrument of corporate interests enmeshed in a military-industrial complex and monopoly media determined to set the consensus with a distinct coloration.

Declaring assumptions is not thinking, but sometimes a necessary precondition. What is required I suppose is an inquiry into the wealth of nations rather than mere thinking, however clever, which is often the selective and partial use of evidence.